Schnidman ’14 to Enter the FDIC’s Research Fellows Program

Max Schnidman’s ’14 academic and extracurricular pursuits during his Hamilton tenure demonstrate a fascination with economic research: he participated in the annual Fed Challenge—a competition in which undergraduate students must present and answer questions about monetary policy and the Federal Reserve; he spent the spring semester of his junior year interning for the Department of State's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs as part of Hamilton’s Washington, D.C. Program; and finally, he culminated his academic career by writing two senior theses—one on the philosophy of economics and another on the economics of happiness. Fittingly, Schnidman will join the Research Fellows Program at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to work as an economic assistant this August.

The FDIC, in addition to insuring all of our bank accounts, inspects financial institutions and their practices to ensure their reliability, and thus as Schnidman noted, “exists to provide stability and confidence in the nation’s financial system.”

As an economic assistant, Schnidman will be on the research side of the corporation, contributing to work looking into the current state of the banking industry and financial markets. In particular, Schnidman said, “I will be collecting and verifying data, researching the literature on banking and finance, and performing some statistical analysis.”

In addition to his work at the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, Schnidman worked as a research associate at Frank N. Magid Associates, a market research firm, which helped him gain the necessary skills and experiences to secure his position at the FDIC. Schnidman hopes that working as an economic assistant for the FDIC will teach him more about the banking system — specifically, how regulation affects the inherent level of risk born out of the financial industry. He hopes to continue in this line of work, perhaps transitioning over to central banking after this two-year position comes to an end.